(RepublicanDaily.org) – With the massive growth in remote work during the recent pandemic, employers have found out the truth about how people behave when their schedule is up to them. Despite some fears that people might just slack off, a number of reputable studies are showing that remote work actually led to longer and more productive labor from employees than traditional in-person work.
This includes a study that observed over 60,000 workers at Microsoft in the first six months of 2020 and discovered that working away from the office led to them putting in 10 percent more hours per week on average.
An additional study done by a research team at the University of Chicago, crunched numbers from 27 nations and discovered that remote work boosted work-per-week by about two hours average. Part of this was due to time saved on commuting; working from home saved people an average of an hour and twelve minutes per day that they would have spent commuting.
It wasn’t only that employees spent less time commuting. Analysts also theorize that wanting to keep the benefit of working from home is part of what motivated them to perform well and get a lot done in order to prove that remote work was a feasible and profitable concept.
Not only did results show a productivity boost, but 94 percent of people polled who worked from home during the pandemic reported preferring remote work or hybrid work to in-person work. Professor Matthew Bidwell of the Wharton School estimates that “80” to “90 percent of employees” are able to work well in remote work and don’t slide into bad habits like watching too much TV or skipping work.
The reverse phenomenon cited by Bidwell is “moonlighting,” where employees take on a number of jobs and pretend they are giving their full schedule to these jobs in order to make more money, while actually doing multiple full-time jobs at once. Despite the increased workload, this pays off on the financial side and can often evade an employer’s notice.
Copyright 2023, RepublicanDaily.org
